Not their shield.

I’d like to discourage people from referring to the bloc-voting campaign with the moniker Sad Puppies. Larry Correia chose that name when he started encouraging his fans to “take back” the Hugos three years ago, and Brad Torgesen adopted it for his suggested slate of nominees when he took over the project this year. In the latter case, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to distance the Sad Puppies from the toxicity of bigots like Vox Day (who was not on Torgesen’s ballot) and to present a kinder, gentler face of right-wing bloc-voting. Day’s response to this was to post his own suggested slate, the Rabid Puppies ballot, including himself in several categories. As this analysis by Mike Glyer shows, it was Day’s choices that prevailed, with almost all Puppy nominees appearing on both ballots or on Day’s alone. Our current slate of Hugo nominees are not a Sad Puppy ballot; they’re a Vox Day ballot. They represent the views of a racist, misogynistic, homophobic troll, whose supporters solicited the help of GamerGate to achieve their goals. Using Sad Puppies as a blanket term allows the people who helped make this happen pretend that it comes down to nothing more than a political disagreement between equally valid stances (as Torgesen has been doing in the Making Light thread) instead of what it actually is, a hate campaign.

More?

Book news, release dates, and so on. Infrequent but useful! Plus, subscribers get a free copy of Wyrdverse: Tales of the Wyrd. Awesome? Yes!

All about Alis

Alis Franklin is an Australianauthor of queerspeculative fiction. She likes cooking, video games, Norse mythology, and feathered dinosaurs. She’s never seen a live drop bear, but stays away from tall trees, just in case.